A few days ago, Jidu officially announced that it has completed the visual and functional design of the first automotive robot concept car, and released the first automotive robot concept car video. The video only shows exactly where the concept car is above the headlights group and the front door of the front view, but we have repeatedly researched and found other details of the concept car.
A cube crystal appears at the beginning of the film, reappears at the end of the film, and merges with the block elements in the new logo of Jidu. This cube crystal looks very important and is likely to appear in the concept car, guessing that it is a kind of intelligent cockpit interaction hardware similar to NIO NOMI, and does not rule out the possibility of a holographic projection device.
Video 12S could be a conceptual design of the cockpit. Below is the central armrest area, where the middle line and purple mood light outline the integrated wrap-around instrument panel. And the two bumps of symmetry above, it is not excluded that it is a lifting sound, and it may also be a sensor in the car - after all, Baidu wants to play the metacosm, if there are two more occupant sensors, it will enrich the way the intelligent cockpit interacts. Of course, the most interesting thing is that we did not see the steering wheel - Jidu inherits Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving capabilities, and automatic driving will inevitably be one of the core competitiveness of the product, but there will definitely be a steering wheel on the 2023 mass production car.
The transition between the 13th and 14th S in the car is very smooth from the picture, which is a bit difficult to guess logically. If you combine the front face of the car that appears behind to guess the camera trajectory, the 14th S exposure is likely to be the concept car rear, and you can see that the set degree is fused with a light strip on the rear wing. Combined with the design manuscripts that have been exposed by Jidu Weibo before, the concept car is likely to be an SUV with a sneaky design.
At the intersection of the A-pillars and the roof on both sides, there are two raised horns, which should be the front side perception camera. This arrangement reduces the perceived visual blind spot, and WEILAI ET7 also adopts this watchtower-style layout scheme.
The concept car door adopts a bezel-less + butterfly wing door design. Butterfly wing door design is mostly found in the top supercars, such as Ferrari Enzo, McLaren F1. In the process of opening the butterfly wing door, no door handle element is seen, and the set degree may design the door opening button to the B-pillar, and it is not excluded that there is a new way to open the door.
The mechanism raised on both sides of the hood is reminiscent of the classic design of the 1970s and 1990s – the jumping light. However, these two devices look more like lidar. Associated with the SIMUCar photos previously released by Jidu, the hood also has two obvious bumps, and jidu is likely to be lidar placed on the hood. In this way, the lidar is hidden under the hood when manual driving, and the lidar is raised during automatic driving, which can also better inform the surrounding vehicles or pedestrians of the status of the vehicle.
Of course, Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu, also mentioned on Weibo that the trend of lidar is to integrate and integrate with the lights, so Jidu may also retain the scheme of placing lidar in the lights. In August 2021, Jidu and Hesai signed a contract to cooperate, and Jidu's mass production vehicle is likely to be equipped with AT128, a long-range hybrid solid-state lidar for ADAS front-loading mass production.
Judging from the details currently exposed, the design language of the Jidu concept car is biased towards simplicity and purity. The simple curve of the dashboard is rational but not mechanical, the crown line of the hood is smooth and the curved surface is relatively full, and the hard lines of the lifting lidar are integrated, conveying a unique sense of automotive robot technology.
Jidu is an automotive robot start-up company initiated by Baidu Group and invested by Geely Group. It is reported that Jidu's first concept car of automotive robots will be officially unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year. When the first product is delivered in mass production in 2023, it will be fully equipped with leading and safe autonomous driving capabilities, without the need for OTA methods.